Day one

My name is Marcus Brigstocke. I'm 34, I'm married – two kids – I'm a comedian and I'm in the Arctic. It's cold. Evidently not as cold as it's supposed to be, but it still feels pretty frosty to me.

I am on board a Norwegian schooner called the Noorderlicht, sailing away from Norway towards Greenland. I am here because a group called Cape Farewell heard a rant I did on Radio 4 about climate change (it pissed off a lot of listeners but pleased a few scientists).

They asked me if I would like to sail, with several artists, educators and oceanographers across a stretch of water that has only just become a stretch of water.

Until recently, the 78th parallel was part of the Arctic ice cap, but not any more. Now it is open sea and we will be the first people to sail across it – ever.

I'd love to say I feel like Captain Cook or some other great pioneering explorer, but in truth I'm pretty scared. I've been looking forward to this trip for four months. It is, after all, the opportunity of a lifetime – but now I'm here it suddenly all feels a long way from home and my family and it's certainly very different from the familiar safety of a stand-up club, a TV studio or the warm embrace of the BBC Radio theatre.

I don't much care if you don't agree that global warming is caused by human activity. It is quite possible that you are sick of the entire eco movement and that phrases like 'Carbon Footprint', 'Reduce Re-use Recycle' and 'offsetting your' this, that or the other make you want to scream or bury your head in the sand.

It doesn't matter. The Arctic is melting faster than the Wicked Witch of the West in an outdoor bath with the shower on in the rain, so whether it's our fault or not may not be that relevant. Whether or not we can change it certainly is.

I'm pitching and heaving about on this freezing cold boat off the Svalbard archipelago for the next 19 days to discover how climate change is likely to affect us at home. I'm told by the oceanographers that what happens in Britain – half a degree of warming one way or the other – is magnified several times up here and that the effects are dramatic and obvious.

If the ice on Greenland melts into the sea then rather than the grape-growing, balmy, Mediterranean climate so many of our columnists optimistically predict for the UK, we will in fact be facing conditions more similar to those in Alaska. I mention this now because it might be a good time to buy a hat. You know, before the rush starts.

My cabin, (number 9) is smaller than the bed-sit I had when I was 17 and I couldn't close the door on that without lifting the corner of my record player (Hendrix and The Cure often came a cropper).

I'm sharing with Mathew, the cameraman who is shooting the trip. He seems nice but also very near; the two factors may well cancel each other out. I suppose we'll see.

There are 24 of us aboard, the four crew and three scientists being the most important and the rest being made up variously of photographers, video artists, journalists, sculptors, musicians, the writer Vikram Seth and me. It is our aim to translate the realities of climate change into a language people want to hear.

The idea is not to preach or harangue anyone into a reluctant, resentful submission. No one will be turned green against their will or forced to live in a hair shirt and tepee.

Instead, the purpose of Cape Farewell is to tell the story of what is happening up here in the Arctic; both to the continent itself and to me and the rest of the crew on this grand adventure. My job will be to find a way to make climate change funny, and I'll be blogging this trip for the Telegraph every day (satellite connection permitting).

I'm going to my cabin now, to sleep with Mathew and my empty suitcase. They're no substitute for my wife but there's nowhere else for them to go.